Tuesday, February 03, 2004

I'm not very good at writing. I find it very hard to express my thoughts and concepts in words in the way I want. I always find myself deleting things and correcting my grammar and phrasing, and I never seem to be able to get it just right.

This is, in a way, why I don't really write as well in my journal as others write in theirs. I think of things I'd like to say, but I never manage to rationalize my thoughts sufficiently to be able to write them up for people to read.

I suppose this is essentially writers' block, of a kind.

I have another problem which I really need to work on, too. I never seem to be able to stick at something until it's done. There's always something else that grabs my interest and distracts me. That's why there are numerous pieces of half-written software lying about my computer's hard drive. Very often, the bits I've written work perfectly, but I've never managed to get round to finishing anything.

For example, consider the Nice & Easy Website Templating System (NEWTS), my home-written templating engine written to power this site. The concept behind writing it was very simple: I wanted to have the power of server-side scripting in terms of the ability to abstract content from formatting, but without having to pay for dynamic web hosting. So NEWTS is a command-line application written in PHP that applies templates to a tree of source files. There's lots wrong with it that I really ought to fix, but it works, so I'm not really motivated to fix it. I've skimmed around the edges of rewriting using XML/XSLT & Java during the last week, but I haven't really got anywhere.

Also phpCO, my web-interfaced address book program. It does all I need it to do, so I don't worry about finishing writing it. Once again, I skirted around the edges of a much better implementation a few months ago, and once again I didn't get anywhere really.

I'm currently having the same problem with my studies and my instrumental practise. This is bad.

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